The Begbie Buzz – What are Comic Strips?

OUR “SUNDAY FUNNIES” – GOOD FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK!

As a class, we revisited features that are often found in newspapers.

As soon as someone mentioned comic strips, the students all declared that learning to cartoon would be our next project for our newspaper blog.  Most of the kids love to draw, and given that a comic strip is just a sequence of drawings arranged in panels to showcase humour or a short narrative, this medium was right up their alley!

To help us along, we took time to study Mo Willems’s artistic style and stories.  The children noticed the following things about the way he illustrates characters such as Piggie, Elephant, Knufflebunny, Trixie, and Pigeon:

Mo Willems often uses:

  • speech or talking bubbles to reveal what the characters are saying to us or to each other
  • thinking bubbles to show what his characters are thinking or reflecting on
  • HUGE words to show someone is loud, excited, or upset
  • all CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation point to show strong emotions
  • tiny font to show someone is quiet, shy, or unsure
  • quotation marks to show a character is talking (“Hello Gerald!”)
  • lots of punctuation marks !!!!???? to emphasize what the character is feeling
  • different facial expressions on the animation to show the different characters’ emotions 
  • feeling words
  • movement or motion lines. 
  • direction to show which way characters are going
  • sound words (“POW!”)
  • humour

The children were very eager to try out many of Mo’s writing elements in their own comic strips!

Full credit goes to Kate of picklebum.com for the free comic strip templates.

Please click on the picture below to see her free comic book templates:

Free Printable Comic Book Templates!

We hope you enjoy our “Sunday Funnies.”  🙂